Developing a Sustainable Urban Environment through Teaching Asset Management at a Postgraduate Level

More than half of the world’s population live in cities, with this proportion expected to grow over time. Cities and other urban areas tend to be significant consumers of natural resources and producers of greenhouse gases. The effective sustainable management of their assets is therefore critical in ensuring that they achieve and maintain a positive living environment that provides safety and security for their citizens while achieving sustainable management goals. A significant contributor to the achievement of this goal is a modern and sustainable asset management process that facilitates well planned and managed roads and other infrastructure, such as water supply, sewerage and communication systems. Developing, managing and maintaining a sustainable urban environment is underpinned by comprehensive asset management systems, supported by other processes, such as risk management, management of engineering projects and taking a strategic approach to managing assets on a life cycle basis. The use of advanced approaches, such as building information modelling (BIM), geographical information systems (GIS), improved asset planning and design, and automated data collection supports these systems. The effective education of engineers and other professionals in advanced asset management is considered to have a major role in developing the strategic asset management leaders who can implement these advanced processes. To meet this requirement, the University of Southern Queensland has developed and updated on an ongoing basis a postgraduate engineering management course in asset management, along with related courses in areas like risk management and project management. These courses take a strategic approach to developing their students and are integrated where possible with relevant standards and systems. Initiatives to incorporate modern asset development and management approaches through utilising them to educate strategic asset managers of the future are discussed